This woman is a true survivor. Marilyn Van Derbur is so humble and graceful. She focuses on truly helping survivors of child sexual abuse, trauma and incest.

After remembering what my father and mother did to me, I wrote Marilyn twice, and she wrote me back twice –once while on an airplane.

Marilyn talks in her book, and in her public speeches, about how much work it is to heal, and what the specific steps are. She does not tell people to just wave trauma and rape away like a pesky fly (Like Elizabeth Smart does).

Marilyn recently won the Lifetime Achievement Award, and she deserves it.

You can read Marilyn’s story by clicking below on the People.com link, or buy her book, Miss America By Day

Thank you for sharing her with us. I know am going to read her book, it shows that we can’t be beaten they may try but her like so many other survivors can go on and make a difference. As I always say you may have taken our childhood, but you did not kill us and i live on happy and successful just to spite you.

I read the article on people.com and couldn’t help notice the attitude and the thoughts of her mother – she knew everything or, at least, she felt instinctively that there’s something wrong – but SHE CHOOSE – to stay in her own little, happy world.
She choose to think at all the good things about her husband and to ignore all the alarm signals.
The mother knew – and that infuriates me more than the heinous acts of her father.

I remember my mother dragging me to every “psychic” in Los Angeles trying to “fix” me as a young teen. They all “saw” a different reason for my emotional and physical problems.

Not one of them ever mentioned “childhood sexual abuse.” My problems, according to them, always stemmed from something that I did or did not do. I was cursed with a “revolving karma account” that included credits and debits from “past lives.”

Those self proclaimed “psychics” made me hate myself even more so I became more depressed and started having suicidal thoughts because of what they “saw” about me.

Good morning. How awful for her to have to stand by her father in all of those pictures. I remember how I felt when I had to walk down the aisle with my stepfather for my wedding. Thank God she could free herself of the shame. I too after many years shook the guilt and shame but it is a work of progress for all of us.

Hi Carol. Marilyn totally disengaged from the incest during the day, so she had no “knowledge” of the incest when she posed for those photos with her father. She called it being “the day child and the night child.” The day child had no knowledge of the night child.